By Melanie Mason/Oakland North
About a month ago, the North Oakland branch of the San Leandro-based chain Pet Food Express was hit by an armed robber. Two weeks later, it happened again, this time at the Pet Food Express Rockridge store, located in the Safeway shopping center at 51st and Broadway. According to employees, it was the same guy.
It was then that the vice president of Pet Food Express, Mark Witirol, started hearing of other armed robberies at the Rockridge shopping center. Frustrated by what he thought was a predictable pattern …

East 14th Street, more commonly known as International Boulevard, runs from Lake Merritt, through the heart of East Oakland and down through San Leandro.
The boulevard cuts through Vietnamese, Mexican and African-American communities, reflecting city’s diversity. On weekends, the streets in Fruitvale and near Lake Merritt bustle with life.
Other stretches are more desolate – dust gathers in empty store windows, graffiti hints at tensions between street gangs and prostitutes ply their trade at all hours of the day.
Additional link: Exotic Escort on Craigslist

[24 Feb 2009 | Comments Off on Linking public health to city planning in Alameda County | ]

By Samson Reiny/Oakland North
Many of Oakland’s community health problems can be traced to a history of bad city planning and land use, an expert from the Alameda County Public Health Department (ACPHD) said last Wednesday during a panel discussion at the American Institute of Architects East Bay offices in downtown Oakland.

Sandra Witt, the County’s deputy director of planning policy and health equity, referred often to a report published last year called “Life and Death from Unnatural Causes: Health and Social Inequity in Alameda County,” as she argued that historical segregation, …

By Anna McCarthy
A peaceful demonstration over the recent fatal shooting by a BART police officer escalated into violence last night in downtown Oakland
Hundreds of demonstrators gathered at the Fruitvale BART station at 3 p.m .Wednesday to protest the death of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, a Hayward resident shot by the BART officer, 27-year-old Johannes Mehserle, in the early morning hours of January 1 on the Fruitvale BART station platform in front of dozens of witnesses. Since the incident occurred, cell phone footage of the shooting, available on the Internet and other …

By Anna McCarthy/510 Report
“Happy New Year’s Eve, I love you, and may God Bless Your Family.”
That was the text that Cephus Johnson said he sent to his nephew, 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, at 12:49 a.m. on Thursday. But Grant never responded, and a little more than an hour later he was shot in the back and killed on the Fruitvale BART station platform by a BART police officer, according to cell-phone videos and eye-witness accounts of the incident.
BART officials said there is no video footage of the incident available from …

Story by Linsay Rousseau Burnett
Hollywood often stereotypes librarians as mousy women in horn-rimmed glasses who hide behind books. But the work of a librarian is not limited to searching databases and silencing noisy patrons. As mandated by the Young Adult Services Association (part of the American Library Association), an element of advocacy underlies the work that librarians do. For one Alameda County Librarian, she took the mandate of advocacy to heart to ensure that her patrons, the inmates of the Alameda Juvenile Detention Hall, were not disenfranchised during the 2008 …

Photos and Story by Linsay Rousseau Burnett
April 1st, 2008. The 911 call came at 2:30am from a woman reporting that she had been raped and robbed inside her apartment. Fremont patrol officers quickly located the suspect in an adjacent apartment where he had barricaded himself inside. It was time to call in the SWAT team. The team quickly surrounded and locked down the building. But after nine hours of failed negotiations, SWAT officers fired tear gas into the apartment. The suspect immediately surrendered was taken into custody without injury.

Story and Photos by Tyler Sipe
Copper metal has become the new gold standard in the underground economy.
Fremont and other East Bay cities have seen a dramatic increase in copper theft, especially since the commodity has risen above $3 a pound.
Fremont Police Detective Bill Veteran said the theft of copper and other metals has reached epidemic proportions, and said he believes most of the offenders in the Tri-City area are drug addicts.

By Adelaide Chen
The nightlife in Oakland’s Eastlake area has never thrived, but it existed quietly. Among the local businesses today, many of the Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants close early, before 8pm.
If it wasn’t enough that the a string of robberies scared away customers in the evenings a few months back, business for the 20 or so restaurant owners have been hit by another factor–the downturn in the economy.